Beyond "I Don’t Know": Evaluating LLM Self-Awareness in Discriminating Data and Model Uncertainty

AbstractReliable Large Language Models (LLMs) should abstain when confidence is insufficient. However, prior studies often treat refusal as a generic "I don’t know”, failing to distinguish input-level ambiguity (data uncertainty) from capability limitations (model uncertainty). This lack of distinction limits downstream action decisions like requesting clarification or invoking external tools.In this work, we introduce UA-Bench, a benchmark of over 3,500 questions drawn from six datasets spanning knowledge-intensive and reasoning-intensive tasks, designed to evaluate explicit uncertainty attribution.An evaluation of 18 frontier LLMs shows that even state-of-the-art models struggle to reliably discriminate between data uncertainty and model uncertainty, and that high answer accuracy does not necessarily imply strong uncertainty attribution ability.To narrow this gap, we propose a lightweight data synthesis and reinforcement learning strategy. Experiments on both Qwen3-4B-Instruct-2507 and Qwen3-8B in thinking mode show that the proposed method improves uncertainty attribution while preserving answer accuracy.Our code and data are publicly available now.